Chapter Text
Part I:
Looking out the door, I see the rain
You can see the funeral from here.
Not hers—not yet. That particular procession won't march through Kazdel's streets for another three days, and by then you'll be sleeping in a sarcophagus, drowning in the mercy of her final gift. But tonight, through the reinforced glass of Babel's control room, you watch some other soul's farewell wind its way through the autumn dusk, black umbrellas blooming like death flowers in the rain.
Your fingers hover over the console. Eighteen ellipses on the screen. Eighteen moments of hesitation before you condemn everything you've built together. The defense grid's status lights blink green-green-green, a heartbeat you're about to flatline.
"Doctor?"
Her voice through the intercom is soft. Too soft. Theresa has always had this way of saying your title like it's something precious, something more than just a designation assigned by necessity. Even now, with Theresis's assassins already mobilizing in the shadows, with your betrayal encoded in every keystroke you haven't made yet, she speaks to you like you're still worth saving.
"Your Majesty," you respond, and the formality tastes like ash. When did you start retreating behind titles? When did 'Theresa' become too dangerous to say?
"You're working late again." A pause. You can picture her in her office three floors up, surrounded by reports she'll never finish reading, plans for a future that won't exist past tonight. "The stars are particularly beautiful this evening. You should come see them."
The stars. She used to drag you and Kal'tsit up to the observation deck during better times, pointing out constellations that meant nothing to you but everything to her. 'That one,' she'd say, tracing patterns in the void, 'reminds me of hope.' And you'd stand there, pretending to see what she saw, pretending her proximity didn't make your chest tight with something you refused to name.
"Perhaps later," you lie.
"Perhaps," she echoes, and there's something in her voice that makes you think she knows. Has always known. Will forgive you anyway.
The funeral below has stopped moving. Someone must have dropped the casket, or maybe the rain has made the path too treacherous. You watch the mourners scramble, their perfect formation dissolving into chaos, and think: this is what grief does. It makes us clumsy. It makes us drop precious things.
Your hand finds the keyboard.
Type: OVERRIDE AUTHORIZATION
Type: CONFIRM SECURITY SHUTDOWN
Type: Your name—your real name, the one only three people in this world know, the one she whispered once when she thought you were sleeping after that disastrous mission in Kazdel.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
You can't do this with your name attached. Let the logs show an anonymous betrayal. Let history forget who you were before you became her executioner.
"Doctor," PRTS chimes in, artificial concern threading through its voice, "you appear to be experiencing elevated stress levels. Shall I alert medical?"
"No." The word comes out sharper than intended. "Run diagnostic mode. Silent operation."
The AI complies, and the room falls into a quiet broken only by the rain against glass and your own thundering heartbeat. Somewhere above you, Theresa is looking at stars you'll never see again. Somewhere below you, a funeral procession reforms its ranks and continues its march.
You think about that song you heard once in a salvaged music player from some dead civilization—something about lovers and regret and being too young to hold on, too old to just break free and run. The melody haunts you now as your fingers hover over the keys that will kill her.
Sometimes a man must awake to find, really, he has no one.
But that's not true, is it? You have her. Have had her in all the ways that matter and none of the ways you wanted. You have her trust, her faith, her impossible belief that you're capable of being better than you are. You have the memory of her hand on your shoulder after a squad was ambushed, the way she said, "This isn't your fault," even though the tactical error was entirely yours. You have the echo of her laughter when Scout told that terrible joke about the Sarkaz who walked into a bar.
You have everything and nothing, and in approximately seventeen minutes, you'll have even less.
Part II:
It's never over
The first time you met Theresa, you were drowning in ten thousand years of sleep.
Kal'tsit and Theresa opened your Sarcophagus in the year 1090, though you wouldn't understand the significance of that date until much later. Light flooded your consciousness like acid, every photon a needle through retinas that had forgotten how to process anything beyond the darkness of suspended dreams.
The first face you saw wasn't Kal'tsit's clinical gaze or the concerned expressions of the research team. It was her—Theresa—leaning over the edge of your prison-turned-cradle with an expression of such profound hope it made something in your chest constrict painfully.
"Hello," she said, and her voice was the first sound your ears processed in millennia. Soft. Careful. Like she was afraid you might shatter if she spoke too loudly. "We've been waiting for you."
You tried to respond, but your throat was dust and cobwebs, your vocal cords atrophied from eons of silence. All that emerged was a rasping wheeze that might have been a word in the language of the dead.
"Don't try to speak yet." Her hand found yours—warm, impossibly warm against your corpse-cold skin. "Kal'tsit says it will take time for your body to remember how to be alive again."
Alive. Were you alive? Or was this another dream, another simulation running through your suspended consciousness while your body rotted in its technological tomb?
"My name is Theresa," she continued, squeezing your hand gently. "I'm... well, the titles don't matter right now. What matters is that you're safe. You're with friends."
Friends. The word felt foreign, archaeological. When had you last had friends? Before the Preservation Project? Before you and Priestess made the choice that doomed a world to save a civilization? The memories came in fragments, each one sharp enough to cut.
"Oracle," you managed to rasp, the name feeling like graveyard dirt in your mouth. "I was... Oracle."
"Not anymore," Theresa said firmly. "That was who you were. Now you get to choose who you'll become." She gestured to Kal'tsit, who stood nearby with medical equipment, watching you with those ancient eyes that seemed to see through everything. "We're hoping you'll choose to be our Doctor. Someone who can help us understand Originium. Someone who can help us save the Infected."
Save them. They believed you held the key to understand Originium and its secrets, and as such aid them in the fight against Oripathy. If only they knew that you were one of the architects of their suffering. That Originium was never a disease to be cured but a tool to be harvested, a battery for a war against entities they couldn't even comprehend.
But looking at Theresa's face—so young, so terribly young compared to your geological age—you found yourself nodding. Because what else could you do? Tell her the truth? Watch that hope crumble into horror as she realized what she'd awakened?
"Doctor," you whispered, testing the title. It felt like a costume, ill-fitting but necessary. "I can be your Doctor."
Her smile could have powered cities.
***
The recovery was slower than anyone anticipated. Your body might have been preserved, but your mind—your mind was archaeology, each memory a fossil that had to be carefully excavated lest it crumble to dust.
Theresa visited every day. At first, it was professional—checking on your progress, discussing Babel's mission, explaining the political situation in Kazdel. But gradually, imperceptibly, it became something else.
She'd bring tea—different varieties each time, determined to find one that "tastes like home" even though you couldn't tell her that home was a concept that had died with your civilization. She'd sit in that uncomfortable chair beside your medical bed and read to you—history books, poetry, even children's stories when she thought you needed something lighter.
"Why?" you asked one day, when she was halfway through a Sarkaz fairy tale about a king who loved their people so much they gave away pieces of their own soul to keep them safe.
"Why what?"
"Why do you spend so much time here? You have a nation to rebuild, a war to fight. I'm just—" You gestured at yourself, still weak, still adjusting to linear time after eons of suspension.
She set down the book and looked at you with those eyes that seemed to see past all your carefully constructed walls.
"Is that really what you think?" She sounded hurt. Actually hurt, like your words had physical weight. "Doctor, you're not a weapon to be aimed at our enemies. You're a person. A person who's been alone for far too long."
"You don't know how long—"
"No," she agreed. "I don't. But I can feel it." She touched her chest, right over her heart. "My Arts... they let me feel what others feel. And you, Doctor, you carry loneliness like other people carry organs. Essential. Inseparable. Ancient."
You wanted to deny it. Wanted to explain that loneliness was just the price of necessity, that isolation was preferable to the alternative. But looking at her—this impossible woman who saw your millennia of solitude and chose to sit beside you anyway—you found the words dying in your throat.
"I don't remember how not to be alone," you admitted, and it might have been the first completely honest thing you'd said since awakening.
"Then we'll teach you," she said simply. "Starting with this: you're not alone anymore. You have Babel. You have Kal'tsit, even if she seems cold. You have me."
"For how long?"
She tilted her head, considering. "How long do you need?"
Forever, you didn't say. I've lived through the death of civilizations and I'll live through yours too, and the loneliness will return like tide after tide, washing away whatever sandcastles we build together.
Instead, you said: "Thank you."
She smiled—sad and knowing, like she'd heard what you didn't say anyway.
***
Months passed. Your body remembered how to function, your mind remembered how to pretend to be human. You became the Doctor in truth—tactical advisor, Originium researcher, someone who could turn Babel's desperate fights into strategic victories.
But more than that, you became her friend. Or whatever you could call the relationship that developed between you—too professional to be romance, too intimate to be mere colleagues. You existed in the spaces between definitions, in the moments after meetings when she'd linger to ask your opinion on things that had nothing to do with war. In the late-night strategy sessions that turned into philosophical debates about the nature of sacrifice and salvation.
"Do you ever wonder," she said once, during one of those sessions when the rest of Babel slept and the world felt small enough to hold, "if we're doing the right thing? If all this fighting, all this death—if it's worth it?"
You looked up from the tactical map you'd been studying. "You're asking me about moral calculus?"
"I'm asking you as someone who's seen more than most." She was curled in her chair again, looking less like a king and more like someone who needed reassurance that their choices meant something.
"In my experience," you said carefully, "the right thing and the necessary thing are rarely the same. But sometimes they overlap. Sometimes doing what's necessary becomes right simply because someone has to do it."
"That's not very comforting."
"Did you want comfort or truth?"
"Both?" She laughed, but it was hollow. "Is that greedy?"
"No," you said, and meant it. "It's human."
"And what about you?" She turned those impossible eyes on you. "What do you want?"
To go back to sleep. To forget what I've done and what I'm about to do. To stop the Originium project before it destroys everything you're trying to save. To warn you that I'm going to betray you and not be able to stop myself from doing it.
"I want to help you save them," you said instead. Another truth wrapped in a lie, or maybe a lie wrapped in truth. Even you weren't sure anymore.
She studied you for a long moment, and you wondered what her Arts were telling her. Could she feel the guilt that hadn't happened yet? The grief for a betrayal still years in the future?
"We will," she said finally. "Together."
Together. Such a dangerous word. Such a beautiful lie.
You nodded and returned to your maps, but you could feel her watching you. And for just a moment, you let yourself imagine a world where together meant something. Where you could be the Doctor she thought you were, fighting beside her until the end, whatever that looked like.
But you knew better. You'd always known better.
The first time you met Theresa, she pulled you from your tomb and offered you redemption you didn't deserve.
The last time you'd see her clearly—before the assassination, before the memory wipe—she'd look at you with those same hopeful eyes and say, "We're so close, Doctor. I can feel it. We're going to change everything."
And you'd nod and smile and start calculating how many defense systems you'd need to disable to ensure her death was quick.
But that was still years away. For now, in this moment, you were just the Doctor, and she was just Theresa, and together you were trying to save a world that you'd already doomed.
"More tea?" she offered, already reaching for the pot.
"Please," you said, and let her fill your cup with something that would never taste like home, no matter how hard she tried.
But you drank it anyway. Because that's what friends did.
Even when one of them was already planning the other's funeral.